Open Conversations: Freedom Requires Privacy (Jarrad Hope, Logos)
Funding the Commons Open Conversations · 2:28
A privacy advocate says civil liberties have eroded over the past two and a half decades, and argues that post-9/11 measures such as the Patriot Act and KYC and AML laws led to surveillance capitalism and financial surveillance of nearly the whole economy. He says blockchains are not highly private despite users' expectations from internet banking, so private transactions and account protection are needed at the blockchain level. He describes an institute building a private-by-default stack with anonymous communications and decentralized file storage, and warns about control asymmetries created by algorithm-driven social platforms.
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From Funding the Commons Open Conversations, hosted by Funding the Commons.
Transcript
I remember seeing on television, you know, the two towers collapse and I mark that as like the point in which our western civilization, western countries had fundamentally changed both through the Patriot Act and through KYC and AML compliance laws. And this has basically led to both surveillance capitalism and financial surveillance of pretty much the entire economy. And over the past two and a half decades, I have witnessed in my lifetime our civil liberties being gradually eroded.
I'm Jared Hope. I'm the director of the Institute of Free Technology, and we develop a lot of privacy technologies that cover anonymous communications, uh, decentralized file storage. So, we're creating a whole decentralized technology stack to build private by default, real decentralized applications. So by private by default I mean today in the sort of blockchain sort of technology ecosystem the most largest sort of blockchain ecosystems effectively is not highly private. When you're using like internet banking or you're doing any u any kind of transaction you kind of have an expectation of privacy or a perception of it which isn't actually there in blockchains. And so it's really important for us to do private
transactions and protect users accounts at the blockchain level. I worry about our future children who will be under the behest of massive information asymmetries or control asymmetries between the sort of tech elites and the general public today. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X or Twitter. They intermediate so much of our modern social lives. They're controlled by algorithms that we don't fully understand and can't control ourselves. we can't even audit them and so they become tools uh for potential propaganda, swaying of public opinion, changing votes, elections. I think for
us to have a more just and freer society like we need to regain control, you know, we need to strengthen our civil liberties uh through privacy technologies. I mean, we can't build Logos without you. So, go to logos.co and come help us build the future.